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Less working hours in US sea ports & container yards makes more difficult to resume ocean container transportation back normal as before.

11 Mar 2021

By Arhtur Chen     Photo:Andrew Coop,Link:Unsplash

Since later half year of 2020, the demand of container transportation has drastically surged but it also has been stuck in the bottleneck in trans-pacific trades because of pandemic affecting to labor shortage which caused severe port congestion in all US main sea ports from west coast, Gulf bay to east coast. The port congestion has led slow turnover both of containers and vessels supply.  In Asia, most factories and sea ports are operating in 7 days/24 hours which is 168 hours a week but there are just 112 hours a week in port berth operating and 88 hours a week in container yards and only allowed to run in the day time. In brief, there is less chance to recover back to normal like 2019.  It used to cost 2-3 days from berthing, unloading & loading in Long Beach of US, however just in February, a 13000 teus vessel has taken 11-14 days to do the same operation. The slow turnover in containers usage make on-going shortage of space in Asia to US, worse is there are no empty containers can be rented to reinforce the supply in this stage.

Ironically, the high ocean rate from Asia to US has been lay down on the peak over 3 months and it has no symbol to rocket up again. Looks like no enough volume to push up the ocean rate but also space shortage is the pillar to hold high peak ocean rate. Some ocean liners make forecast this kind situation – High ocean rate but Less supply of space & equipment shall be going till mid of 2021. 

On the other hand, the ocean rate from Asia to Europe already 150% higher than Asia to US just in recent 2 months period time.  Most shipping lines prefer to move those empty containers be used in Asia to Europe to make higher profit margin and faster turnover in containers usage. Well, pandemic has changed all economic as well as the traditional way of business model by steamship liners. They adopt more flexible and profitable strategy to grab the chance to check and balance the pocket. We have to keep on suffering few more months before ocean rate down and sufficient space supply.  

Read more :Most of the major shipping lines stop accepting the containers to the UK destinations

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